


The Man Who Sold The World

by CantSpeakFae



Series: Once More With Glitter [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, And does not get better from there, Copious Bowie Referencing, Demonic Possession, I have a lot of feelings about characters who never got any screen time, Mentions of past child abuse, Other, Prisoner of the Council, Randall has basically been winter soldier'd except he can remember shit, Rupert Giles' father is abusive, The Council is evil, This starts off angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 15:04:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15843756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CantSpeakFae/pseuds/CantSpeakFae
Summary: It's been fifteen years since Randall was killed in that warehouse and fifteen years since misplaced trust and an Urn of Osiris brought him back from the other side, alive but not alone in his body. The Council thinks it's time to move forward with him finally being tested as a weapon... but one Watcher isn't so sure.





	The Man Who Sold The World

Ronald’s head is bowed as he storms across the Council ground, protecting his steel-grey eyes from the winds that whip his hair and scarf around his head. His forehead is pinched, corners of his mouth turned down in a frown. Only the crunch of worn gravel beneath the soles of his feet shatter the silence of his stroll and the sun has only just started to set to the west; the sky that was a canvas of blue now bleeding with shades of pink, orange, and gold. He’s earlier than usual, but he’s sure his… “host” won’t mind the intrusion. It’s not as though he has much else to do.   
  
He cuts through the grass, to the back door of one of the adjoined Council Buildings. An old area, that is said to only house out-of-date texts (even by their standards), broken weapons, and other equipment that they no longer have a use for. Locked and out of bounds for any Watcher who has come to finish his field training.   
  
But there’s more to be found behind those walls than busted lawn mowers. And Ronald would know better than anyone. He’s the one who _put_ it there. He fumbles for the key that he keeps in the breast pocket of his tweed coat, pulling it out on its delicate chain and unlocking the door.   
  
It’s colder inside than it was out. An unnatural chill that seeps through the walls and cools him to the bone. He ignores the tremors of unease and locks the door again, behind him, before pushing aside a stack of old chairs beneath a white dust cover and leans down to pull on the handle of a trap door, revealing a hidden, old set of spiral stairs that lead deeper down into the building.   
  
The chill gets stronger.

Pulling his coat tighter around himself, he begins to make the descent. It’s a steep descent, but it’s not long before he can hear voices. And _laughter_. It sets his teeth on edge and his hand curls into a fist at his side.   
  
Of all the days to try his patience...this one is not one of them.   
  
It only takes another moment for him to step into the brightly lit basement. Every torch on the wall is burning and the men on guard - an older Watcher from the Yulin family, and a newer one who had promoted on Quentin Traver’s request who liked to simply be known as “Ben” - were closer to the cage than they were supposed to be, regarding the creature inside with great interest.   
  
Ronald Giles grimaced. Showing off again, is he? He cranes his head to get a better look at the man in the cage, seeing that he’s hanging upside down from the top of it, no discernible explanation of how he got up there, in the first place. Shirtless and exposed to be ogled at by the fools who had no idea what to make of him. Grinning like a trapeze artist, curling up into himself, doing “sit-ups” while hanging, and making a _fool_ of himself, and seemingly telling them a story. He doesn’t listen to the words coming from the man. It’s dangerous to hear him speak. Ronald’s upper lip curls back over his teeth.   
  
“That’s quite enough.”   
  
It’s worth it, he thinks, to see the men startle. Watching the two of them jump back away from the cage with hands raised and eyes wide, realized that they’ve been caught. Ronald’s known for some time that they’ve been shirking their duty, but today was the first time he’d actually _caught_ them.   
  
“...I will deal with this, later. Go.”   
  
They don’t need to be told twice. The younger one, Ben, shoots a look at the creature in the cage, who hadn’t moved from his spot, but then both Watcher’s are gone, scurrying up the stairs, and leaving Ronald alone with _it._   
  
He approaches, slowly, not crossing the line. He’s not as fool as the rest of them.   
  
...Good evening, Randall. Entertaining, today?

“Well, I’d wanted to go and see a picture… but I just couldn’t get anyone interested enough to come along with me.”  
  
Randall speaks dryly, eyes closed, and still hanging from the bar that he has his legs bent over, keeping himself up the air and hanging over the concrete floor. One wrong move and he’d crack his skull like an egg. Strange how that was more of a promise than a punishment…   
  
He curls up, into himself, again. With limited options for entertainment in a place like this, climbing over the bars like the world’s most depressing jungle gym and working out every muscle he could think to use were really the only things that occupied his time, when he was left alone. But, he knows Ronald won’t talk to him when he’s like this, and the only way to get rid of him is to sit through the lecture, so he unhooks his legs and lets himself fall through the air.   
  
He tucks into himself at the last second, flipping mid-air, and landing on his feet. He grabs his shirt from where he’d draped it over the little cot that he’d called his bed for the last fifteen years and wiped the sweat from his forehead and well-defined chest before grabbing a fresh one from the “dresser” that had been shoved inside of his small space to give his prison more of a room-like feeling, pulling it on and approaching the bars with interest.   
  
“You’re early.”   
  
He doesn’t know how he knows that. There are no windows down here. No way to tell time. It’s just a feeling he has, deep inside, as instinctive as the signals that his brain sends to keep his heart beating or his lungs filling with air.   
  
“To what do I owe the pleasure? If you wanted a story, I’m afraid you only caught the tail-end of story time. Or the “tale” end, as it were.” He grins at his own bad joke, not at all surprised when Ronald doesn’t look nearly as amused as he feels. No one is ever as amused as he feels.

“Unfortunate, that.”  
  
His voice is dry and he’s suddenly overcome with the nearly uncontrollable urge to reach through the bars and throttle the humour out of the man’s voice. To squeeze his thumbs into the soft flesh of his throat until he stops breathing and put an end to this madness before it could _begin_ . But he takes a deep breath to steady himself, reminding himself of all that he had to go through to get this far… and of the satisfaction he’ll feel when he finally proves Quentin Travers wrong on all counts.   
  
Randall will either be his ticket or his undoing. It all depends on his next three moves in this chess game.   
  
“What story were you beguiling them with? Something daring, perhaps...a tale of six wayward youths indulging in magical debauchery?” His tone is biting and he means for Randall to feel the full sting of his words. “I forget how that one ends. Tell me, again?”

“...Who knows?”  
  
The answer is immediate. Instinctive, meant to silence the loaded question before it can goad him from the state of euphoria he’s in and beckon his true nature out of him. It serves its purpose, well enough, as the words suddenly remind him of an old Bowie tune that he’d loved in the time outside of these empty walls and he hums the tune, dropping down into his cot to get his breathing back to normal. (He’s not as young as he used to be…)   
  
“Not me. We never lost control...you’re face to face with the man who sold the world…”   
  
He mimes strumming a guitar, his humming echoing the sound of climbing notes on a perfect rhythm. Now, sufficiently taken away from the barb that Ronald had meant to sting him with, he continues on.   
  
“I was actually telling them the story of Bathsheba. You know, if I don’t recite those stories they sort of start to fade from my mind… and I’m already one of the worst Catholics ever, second only to every other Catholic in the world. Can’t forget the stories.”   
  
He taps his temple, but the humour doesn’t stay in his face for long.   
  
“...What do you want?”

Listening to him ramble on, darting from one topic to the next in a pitiful attempt to protect himself… it’s pathetic and worrying. This is who the Council wants to send out, is it? Fifteen years of work and he’s no better now than he was when they’d first brought him back from the other side. A waste of a precious urn of Osiris. There are so few of those left in the world and what do they have to show for it, now?   
  
He won’t stand for it.   
  
If Quentin won’t see reason - if he insists on using _him_ \- then he’ll do everything in his power to keep from being made a fool.   
  
He strolls closer still, breaching that line between them, and standing close to the bars, now.   
  
“I know you’ve heard the whispers from my colleagues. Rumors that you may have a life outside of this cage, after all. A chance to prove your usefulness to the Council and earn yourself a small amount of freedom, provided you’re capable of the job we’ve trained you for? Well, I’ve come to warn you.”

“Warn me?”  
  
Randall repeats, his eyebrows raised. He pushes up from the cot, rising back to his feet, and meets Ronald at the bars. No fear in his dark eyes; if he’s going to grab him and slam him forward into the bars or try to strangle him… well, it’s nothing that he hasn’t tried before. Nothing he hadn’t endured, and certainly not the worst of it since he came here.   
  
When he was a child, his mother would sometimes hold him down in the bath. Grab him by his hair and force his head under the water until the world went dark, only to pull him out, perform CPR, and do it again if she felt he hadn’t been “cleansed” enough.   
  
And he would take that a thousand times over again. Take it, and be grateful, because compared to what this man did to him, every day, for nearly a decade until he finally decided that Randall was broken enough to no longer need such strenuous “training”, that was a cakewalk.   
  
And it meant that there was no longer anything that Ronald could do to put the fear of God in him. It’d all be beaten out of him. So he stares him down, waiting.   
  
“This should be good. What do _you_ feel the need to warn _me_ about?”

Just that I wouldn’t get too pleased if I were you. This is not your chance for freedom. You may see more than these four walls, very soon, but if you think that you’re getting away from us -- from _me_ \-- you’re sorely mistaken. The Council is everywhere. Any mistake you make, any slip that reflects poorly on me and I will make you regret it.”   
  
He does reach through the bars, then, grabbing Randall by his arm and yanking him forward so that his face collides with the bars. It’s wise of the man to turn his head at the last minute and hit his cheek against it, rather than his nose. Perhaps he is capable of thinking a few steps ahead… isn’t that a surprise?   
  
“Do you understand me? If you think you’ve felt pain, before, I promise you that anything else you’ve felt will look like the tenderest of mercies in the face to what will happen if you fail me.”

There’s going to be a bruise on Randall’s face. As it is, red blooms across his cheek where he hit the bar and it’s his own, sheer luck that he didn’t crack his cheekbone against the solid metal of the cage. And his voice is slightly muffled when he responds, as dryly as he can.  
  
“...Message received.”   
  
He doesn’t have to ask what about this puts him on edge. He’s already feeling that same tension… though, for different reasons.   
  
Ripper Giles.   
  
Ripper bloody Giles.   
  
It somehow always comes back to him, doesn’t? In the beginning, when he’d first woken up to darkness and pain, those were the threats that kept him docile and bound by his own command.   
  
“Keep quiet, or we’ll kill him.”   
  
“Keep still, or we’ll bring him here and let him see what he didn’t stop from happening to you.”   
  
And then, when time passed, and enough so that whatever love had been between them could not longer, conceivably exist...when it had been long enough that Ripper must have ~forgotten his name and the details of his face, the threats became biting remarks. Reminders of what he was; just a forgotten piece of a puzzle that was burned a long time ago. All that’s left of yesterday; a soul stolen from his rightful footnote in history.   
  
“There’s nothing for you, there. No one remembers who you are.”   
  
“Wouldn’t you rather mean something, here, than be nothing out there?”   
  
It always comes back and he’s sick of it. He’d rather be nothing and have no one than have to endure much more of this. At the hands of _anyone._   
  
And then, a surge of anger, blooming inside of him inspired by the pain in his face. In the dark, Randall’s eyes glow gold, his voice as cold as ice when he speaks again.

“...Now, take your fucking hand off of me.”  
  
He’s not as young as he used to be… not as _weak_ as he once was.

Ronald suddenly releases him, not of his own free-will, his hand retracting as though peeled back by an invisible force, strong enough to throw him back. He stumbles, but doesn’t fall, and stares after him with rage in his expression Staying still and quiet, however, until Randall’s eyes stop glowing and the familiar darkness overtakes them instead.  
  
Perhaps there’s hope for him, yet. He’s got spine. More than Ronald’s worthless son ever had.   
  
“Don’t forget what I said.”

He said, shaking a finger at him.  
  
“No mind games will keep me from raining the fury of hell down on you if you let me down.”

“...I gazed a gazely stare at all the millions here.”

Randall settles back down into his cot, no longer acknowledging him. The power of the Sleepwalker awake, again, and sweeping through him. Simultaneously demanding blood and promising euphoria. And the lyrics just keep coming. He closes his eyes, waiting until he hears Ronald’s sigh of disgust and his footsteps retreating from the room and back up those stairs, leaving him to his “madness” before he opens them, again.   
  
They glow in the darkness that surrounds them. And he sings on.   
  
“...I must have died alone. A long, long time ago.” 


End file.
